Episode 74 – The Whisperer in Darkness – Part 1

Joining us on our journey into wild Vermont are guest Andrew Leman and reader Matt Foyer, a couple of the folks behind the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s film adaptation, playing at festivals now!

And that’s not all – our show is accompanied by musical selections from the film, composed by none other than Troy Sterling Nies!

Woohoo! It’s been a long slog through some junk (Medusa’s Coil, The Electric Executioner I’m looking at you), but now we’re back into the good stuff.

Also, guys, I’ve heard about your technical issues with the show, and I’d just like to say that I really appreciate all the hard work you do to put out one of the best podcasts around.

Tom McCambley on

April 21, 2011 at 3:25 AM

I also want to say how much I’ve appreciated this work, and that I very much enjoy every new episode you put up. WiD is my favourite HPL story, and if the first episode is any indication (much like your CoC ones) that these are going to be my favourite episodes!

Dreamhead on

April 21, 2011 at 5:26 AM

oooh yea babe,can’t wait to listen to it 🙂

Brian on

April 21, 2011 at 6:27 AM

A few years back, I did a New England roadtrip and along the way we visited some of those isolated Vermont wooded roads. Yeah, still creepy almost a hundred years later.

BTW, just a quick correction: Necronauts actually ran in 2000ad in 2000-2001, not mid to late 80s. Both Frazer Irving and Gordon Rennie have gone on to do other Lovecraft related works and are thoroughly worth checking out.

Great as always. The only bad point was having to wait for the next part!

BigRuta on

April 23, 2011 at 4:02 PM

Great cast! This is (yet another) of my favorite HPL stories. And how perfectly Lovecarftian is it that Richard Crenna came back from the dead to be your reader!!! Just kidding Matt : ) You do a fantastic job.

Marcus Good on

April 23, 2011 at 8:09 PM

Whee, some crypto content I can comment on! 🙂

I don’t really think of Fort as being that involved with cryptozoology; aside from some reports of sea serpents, he generally avoided that aspect. Bernard Huevelmans is pretty much considered the “father” of the field, especially as he invented the term. Fort, on the other hand, produced some very philosophical passages on the nature of understanding, such as his expressions on how colours are simply variances of a wavelength – so how does one distinguish red from yellow, since there are colours in between? He also summated the interconnectivity of systems with “One measures a circle beginning anywhere”.

The Alien Big Cats phenomena is still a worldwide notable; we have similar sightings here in Australia of cougar or panther-like animals, both in the Gippsland region and the southwest corner. The UK has an *extensive* history. The real issue is how to explain a lack of remains, despite all the predation of livestock.

But I think Chad is right about the cougars, in that cougars have over the past few decades made massive recovery incursions into places they were pretty much considered “extinct”. It’s entirely plausible one *was* seen, and it moved on. There have also been unusual sightings of jaguars in the Texas area, and “large lions”, which have been argued as being circus escapees, or somehow-surviving cave lions.

The “mi-go/mi-gou” is one name for the yeti, others include the metoh kangmi, and the Sherpa term yeh-teh. Huevelmans analyses the etymologies though, suggesting “yeti” is pretty much “that thing there”, and mi-go being the most accurate (being either “fast man-creature” or “(neuter)man-creature”). It’s also worth noting that it was the 30s when Westerners really began to take note of the reports, but it wasn’t until the 40s/50s that the idea of this creature being a large ape-man type of thing became fixed in the communal mind, hence why HPL maybe struck upon the term and the concept of unknown creatures in montane places.

Lastly, there are copies of Necronauts floating around online as cbz/cbr files; ideally, I’d have purchased a copy, but given their rarity, I had to make do with a scanned version. IIRC, it was originally serialised in that bastion of British comics lore, 2000AD..

Thanks for a great show, Chad, Chris and Andrew!

Cult45 on

April 23, 2011 at 9:24 PM

The whole winged bug-like super sentient beings also seem as a proto-mothman sort of thing (human agents/MIBs etc.), terrific stuff. The mothman prophecies movie also seems to borrow some elements from this story like the prerecorded voices/ doppelgangery.

But…wait a minute…when I posted my previous comment I was thrown back in time to the OLD site! Is this a time portal? Are there Yithians at work here? Should I start writing a cosmic journal for the Akashic Records?

The new look for the site is absolutely spot-on — wonderful. It feels eldritch on ye eyes. It’s been a while since I have read this story — been wanting to wait until I see ye new cinematic rendition — but I am tempted to go ahead and listen to this new offering from you’s fiends.

Excellent start to the coverage! I never made the connection between Charles Fort and the character of “investigator” in the Chaosium “Call of Cthulhu” RPG, but it seems like a good match from the background mentioned. The music from the film is also excellent, I’ve got money in my hands ready to order the DVD!